When we assert the value of such study, we find ourselves committed to an important assumption. Most students of literature, whether they call themselves scholars or critics, are ready to argue that it is possible to understand literary works as well as to enjoy them. Many will add that we may find our enjoyment heightened by our understanding. This understanding, of course, may in its turn take many forms and some of these -- especially those most interesting to the student of comparative literature -- are essentially historical. But the historian of literature need not confine his attention to biography or to stylistic questions of form, ``texture,'' or technique. He may also consider ideas. It is true that this distinction between style and idea often approaches the arbitrary since in the end we must admit that style and content frequently influence or interpenetrate one another and sometimes appear as expressions of the same insight. But, in general, we may argue that the student can direct the primary emphasis of his attention toward one or the other.

At this point a working definition of idea is in order, although our first definition will have to be qualified somewhat as we proceed. The term idea refers to our more reflective or thoughtful consciousness as opposed to the immediacies of sensuous or emotional experience. It is through such reflection that literature approaches philosophy. An idea, let us say, may be roughly defined as a theme or topic with which our reflection may be concerned. In this essay, we are, along with most historians, interested in the more general or more inclusive ideas, that are so to speak ``writ large'' in history of literature where they recur continually. Outstanding among these is the idea of human nature itself, including the many definitions that have been advanced over the centuries; also secondary notions such as the perfectibility of man, the depravity of man, and the dignity of man. One might, indeed, argue that the history of ideas, in so far as it includes the literatures, must center on characterizations of human nature and that the great periods of literary achievement may be distinguished from one another by reference to the images of human nature that they succeed in fashioning.